• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, December 8, 2008

The Interactive Advertising Bureau on Monday released its audience reach measurement guidelines, providing definitions for key terms such as "unique users" and "cookies," and setting standards for measuring audiences regardless of methodology.

Announced at the IAB's annual Leadership Forum on Audience Measurement in New York, the new guidelines will be available for public comment until Jan. 20.

"These guidelines represent an industrywide endorsement of clarity and transparency of methodologies and metrics, particularly around reach, a core metric used throughout the media world," said Sherrill Mane, senior vice president for industry services at the IAB, in a statement.

The audience reach guidelines are also intended to pave the way for Web measurement services to have their practices audited. ComScore, Nielsen Online and Quantcast are currently undergoing audits by the Media Rating Council, a nonprofit charged with validating audience measurement systems across media.

At the conference, George Ivie--executive director and CEO of the MRC--said the audits of comScore and Nielsen were well along, with a number of steps completed, including evaluation of both companies' metering systems for estimating audience size. "Their meters both work, but very differently," he said.

In conjunction with the IAB, Ivie also said the MRC is finalizing guidelines for counting "clicks," and that developing guidelines for in-game and mobile advertising are next up. "The key thing is we all have to start speaking the same language," he said, in terms of standardizing how metrics are defined and derived.

Posing an additional challenge to that goal are newer forms of online media including social networking sites, video, Web applications and user-generated content. A pair of morning panels at the IAB conference focused on different approaches to audience measurement in online video and social media.

Matt Cutler, vice president for marketing and analysis at Visible Measures Corp., stressed the importance of tracking viral distribution of video as viewers pass along favorite clips to friends and others. "Video on the Web is very different than TV because it's a social experience," he said.

So beyond traffic to the original site where a video appears, the total audience encompasses subsequent viewing on video-sharing sites, social networks and personal blogs. "Measuring online video isn't just about the assets you know, but about the ones you don't," said Cutler, whose firm tracks more than 100 million videos across the Web to provide a comprehensive picture of audience activity.

Dave Osborn, senior vice president of product leadership at Nielsen Online, agreed. He said marketers often want to know how consumers interacted with a video beyond the initial viewing, asking: "Was there engagement with the creative itself? Are they passing it along? Are videos going viral?"

Quantcast Chief Marketing Officer Adam Gerber emphasized that any metrics associated with video have to be simple for advertisers and agencies to evaluate and act upon in order to encourage the emerging medium's growth. "What will drive adoption is to make it scalable," he said.

Mike Hudack, founder and CEO of video site Blip.tv, who attended the session, also expressed the need for Web video standards and guidelines. "Planners and buyers need to have confidence that everybody is measuring things the same way," he said.

He pointed to something as basic as defining exactly what constitutes a video view--whether it's every time a video is requested or watched for a minimum duration or some other standard. "It's one of the most important issues facing video today," he said.